When Colts Ran Read Online Free PDF

softer than thistledown in her bruised heart.
    The only living creatures were goats – a herd of big-horned, dapple-bred animals making their way through dead trees on the riverbank, disdaining shortages and getting by on pride. Their smell was rank urine on a twist of breeze.
    â€˜My goats,’ Veronica called them.
    â€˜You can have ’em,’ said Colts.
    â€˜Your goats,’ she taunted back at him, and he’d never tell her how when he’d looked through her studio window and seen that goat and that boy, how he’d loved himself in his collarless shirt and braces, chin up eyeing back at the painted eyes transfixing him. He’d been made a hero, taking that exchange of looks as an assurance of time at his feet like dirty clothes he’d never need to pick up.
    The padlock on the caravan dangled open and tinned food left inside was gone. Piles of old newspapers were stained by marsupial mice, their nest of leaves neat as a whirlpool, but soiled. Veronica’s painting of a lovers’ arbour done the year of her marriage to Buckler, 1931, was blistered and cracked.
    She cursed the swagman who was left to mind the outfit. Buckler had promised his care.
    Colts went around cooeeing and then went to the waterbag and drank tepid, fibrous water.
    Veronica found the swagman when she went to wash in the billabong. She covered her mouth. He seemed to have arranged himself with some deliberation in a cleft of eroded bank. Pads of dumped leaves matted his head and shoulders. The gun, what her father called a fowling-piece, well named, had fallen from his grip when the shell was fired, leaving his shattered face thankfully turned away. He was a clothed skeleton.
    Colts heard her cry and came looking.
    â€˜Don’t look,’ she warned.
    Suicide was expected of mad hatters and lonely figures in the bush, but the details were unwanted.
    â€˜A dead body,’ Colts so very needlessly stated. His gaze, like a wary fly resisting its need, came and went but never too close.
    Veronica spoke a prayer for the dead, in the same breath thinking such inert, angled limbs could never be imagined but needed to be studied in this lonely place, nose wrinkled against the stench. She wanted pencils she didn’t have on her, and lucky for her shame. ‘Hallowed be thy name, thy will be done . . .’
    Colts stepped away from Veronica’s side and peered closer over the bank. ‘Ashes to ashes, that is for sure,’ said the trembling boy. Dead men were a separate matter from the fine singing soldiers of human memory Dunc Buckler wrote about, yodelling and chucking grenades at Huns.
    Veronica had no answer except to hope, as Colts once expressed it – a small boy longing for a mother’s love – that they would all gather in heaven.
    It was what he’d said one day, she insisted on reminding him, reducing them all to tears. ‘Such a wise little man, so beautiful.’
    â€˜That’s bunkum and bull, and you know it,’ said Colts.
    â€˜You were seven, dear, almost eight, the age of divine reason in a child, and what can I say?’ She reached for his hand. ‘That you were wrong? You were not wrong. Heaven is a memory and a promise.’
    â€˜Bloody palaver,’ he spat.
    â€˜Buckler’s words,’ corrected Veronica. ‘What are yours?’
    Colts had the motorbike running when Veronica came back. They had not unpacked. Now he switched the engine off and watched as Veronica stacked dry thistles and parched leaves under the caravan and hauled dead branches over and struck a match.
    â€˜What are you doin’?’
    â€˜Making a fire.’
    â€˜You’re not going to burn it?’
    He tried too late to stop her.
    â€˜That’s ours!’
    The flames drove him back with his arms crossed over his face. The fire wouldn’t spread because there was no grass to burn, just bare dirt everywhere, although dirt itself might